Parents of children in grades K-12 plan to spend an average of $873 per student, according to research from the Rubicon Project.

Although moms traditionally occupied the Chief Buying Officer role of their households, new research from Yahoo indicates that a new generation of Millennial dads want to get more involved. As a result, retailers need to understand the buying behaviors and preferences of these younger dads, and tailor back-to-school campaigns and messages to them.

Instagram has 300 million active users visiting the site each month, making it a valuable social network for brands and retailers.

If you’re new to Instagram, start with the basics: Create a username that closely matches your business. In cases where your name is already taken, get creative, but also don’t make yourself too hard to find. For example, we had to pivot a little with @shopBindo. Then, select a password that is easy to remember.

Social media provides unique value to retailers’ marketing campaigns, allowing them to promote branded content and images that align with the brand but still reach a large pool of consumers. With numerous networks to choose from, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, retailers can interact directly with consumers through messaging, photo sharing and video sharing and gather opinions that can help shape their brand.

Smith Optics, a retailer of eyewear and outdoor gear, leveraged the Pulse Marketing Suite from social content marketing platform provider ReadyPulse to curate user-generated content (UGC) and link it with relevant products. The retailer had initially partnered with ReadyPulse to reduce the time necessary to track its sponsored athletes’ social activities, and measure the ROI of each athlete to determine their most valuable sponsorships.

Retailers don’t need to be told that they exist in an ultra fast-paced, quickly evolving, and insanely competitive space. There is no time to be complacent and those who aren’t leading are probably lagging. When it comes to e-Commerce, the curve is even more exponential. Each day a retailer slips behind the competition equates to more effort and resources required to catch up than the previous day.

As the digital landscape continues to expand, retail brands are presented with more opportunities than ever to interact with consumers across channels and gather valuable insights along the way.

In a world where data begets data, the most potent campaigns are powered by cross-channel initiatives, which allow consumers to move seamlessly across social channels and experience brand messaging in a way that’s consistent and familiar.

Tumblr has seen its active user base grow 120% in the last six months, making it the fastest-growing social network in 2014, according to research from GlobalWebIndex. Tumblr edged out Pinterest, which reported an active user increase of 111% throughout the same time period.

The fastest-growing social mobile app in the last six months is Snapchat. With a 56% increase in users, Snapchat's growth has been spearheaded by a large teen presence in several countries, including: Ireland (38% of teens have used the app in the past month), Canada (35%) and the UK (35%). Not far behind Snapchat are Facebook Messenger (52% increase in users) and Instagram (47%).

By establishing in-house innovation labs, retailers like Nordstrom, Walmart and Zappos are focusing on testing new tools, technologies business concepts.

CVS Health is the latest retailer to join the innovation lab fray. This week, the retailer signed a lease to open a new Digital Innovation Lab on Huntington Ave. in Boston, Mass. The 15,130-square-feet location will serve as a hub for the CVS Health Digital team, which will remain headquartered in Woonsocket, R.I. Recently, CVS Health also opened a new Digital Experience Center at the company’s headquarters, and is actively recruiting new talent for both locations.

As many as 82% of “Empty-Nester Boomers” spend more time browsing for products online than in-store, according to a report from Influence Central and Vibrant Nation. Empty-Nester Boomers are characterized as shoppers born between the years 1946 and 1964 who do not have children living at home.

With the holiday season kicking off soon, Amazon has developed a new way for customers to add items to their Amazon wish lists.

Consumers can now update their wish lists on Twitter using the hash tag #AmazonWishList. When shoppers find tweets from brands and friends that include a Amazon.com product links, they can reply with the hashtag and immediately have the product added to their wish list.

Many retailers may believe they’re already doing a fine job of listening to their customers. After all, they see shoppers in their stores; track their online and mobile shopping patterns and eventual purchases; and in some cases, leverage loyalty and customer relationship management programs to paint detailed portraits of who their customers are, as well as the value they represent to the retail organization.

Useful as all these research tools are, they simply aren’t capable of keeping up with the newly energized, highly empowered customer. Today’s consumer is increasingly aware not only of what she wants but when she wants it, how she wants it delivered and even how much she wants to pay for it. Her expectations around product availability, depth of information, and delivery options have risen sharply, fueled by the immediacy of search engines, smart devices and a crowd of competitors ready to meet the most specialized request.